Samsung Monte S5620

Available
now 10th February 2010

Tbe Samsung Monte, or Samsung GT-S5620
is a 3.5G GPS enabled touchscreen phone with WiFi. It is similar
in specification to the B7300
(but without Windows) and the Blue
Earth (but without a solar panel), meaning that the Monte fits
into a very small gap in Samsung's current product range.

The S5620 Monte does look quite stylish and interesting,
but some of the other features can best be regarded as being mundane
but useful. The 3" 240 x 400 pixel touchscreen display is a
fairly standard TFT panel that is similar to many others on the
market. On the back is a 3.2 megapixel camera with support for geo-tagging,
which is again useful but not extraordinary.

This is a 3.5G device with maximum HSDPA download
speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps, and the Monte also supports WiFi connectivity.

Social networking support is built in, with applications
for Facebook and MySpace plus support for Bebo and Twitter, which
we guess is kind of inevitable these days. The Monte runs the TouchWiz
2.0 Plus interface on top of Samsung's own proprietary OS.

Multimedia
support is decent enough, with a multimedia player that can
cope with MP3, AAC and WMA audio plus others, and H.263, H.264 and
MPEG4 video. There's no mention of support for WMV video so we guess
it doesn't have it. There is a 3.5mm audio socket though, and the
Monte supports stereo Bluetooth.

The built-in GPS supports Google Maps 3.0 and Google
Latitude. Again, this is useful but just about every other handset
we see at the moment can do the same thing.

All the usual software features are here such as
a web browser and email client, and the S5620 also supports Exchange
ActiveSync. Again, these features are hardly uncommon.

But add all these features together and it does
seem that the S5620 Monte does seem to have almost everything you
need. Yes, there are phones with better displays and cameras and
cleverer operating systems and gimmicks, but we have to admit that
the Monte does seem to be pretty well specced.

It manages to avoid the dreaded black slab effect
somewhat, and it is available in black / silver or graphite / orange
colour combinations.

A suggested SIM-free retail price of about €260
marks this out as a midrange handset. Samsung say that the Monte
should be available in February in Germany and will be supported
with a multi-million pound advertising campaign in April in the
UK.

Update: The S5620 will be available in Spain
under the "Onix" name and may possibly be available in
other countries with some sort of variation of the "Onyx"
tag.